Atlassian CEO 20VC长访谈谈AI代理、界面与中国模型，仅为战略观点无新增可交易事实

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单集:20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models | Why The Jury Is Still Out On The Benefits of Specialised Models with Mike Cannon-Brookes
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If you're giving up on your user interface, if you're giving up on evolving your experience for a customer, that's a brainless bet. I don't think agents will replace all the interfaces. >> In today's show, we sit down with Mike Cannon Brooks, founder and CEO at Atlassian to discuss what happens to traditional software in a world where agents are able to extract information from databases. Do they still carry value? How does Atlassian think about building the context layer? And what does this mean for the next generation of enterprise software? this and so much more in an incredibly revealing but also just awesome discussion with Mike. I've known him for years. >> For the first time in a long time, we're solving foundational design challenges. Again, there is certainly some customer push back in some places to quote unquote Chinese models. There is not customer push back to open models. The jury is really out on the benefits of building specialized models at the moment. Right now, the production of technology is faster than the consumption of technology. We're moving from a world of information asymmetry to imagination asymmetry. >> Ready to go. >> Mike, dude, I love our conversations. They are always my favorite. So, thank you so much for joining me today. >> Oh, thanks for having me back, man. It's appreciated. Get invited back. I must give those interesting answers. I saw you a little rant the other day. I loved it. you give honest answers which I don't always get. Um the thing that I really want to start on is we see a world of agents and agents remove a lot of human need and interaction with data providers or data sources. I'm just how do you think about a world where value shifts as agents retrieve and do tasks for us and the potential for an Atlassian to be a data provider not a doer? I think there's some premise of the question that's slightly incorrect. Um heavy >> uh I think look I can see for certain tasks that is the case where the tasks are very functional that is the case where the tasks have a lot of taste and interaction and collaboration involved. I don't think that will be the case certainly not in the same way. Um so it's very hard to give an answer across all types of tasks. You know, one might ask um there are certain types of shopping if you take a consumer task, not something that we do obviously. So, so a safe example, there are certain types of shopping. I just want to get the thing and move on. If I'm buying, I don't know, new >> Nike trainers, >> charging cable off Amazon. Just give me the charging cable. I don't I don't care. I don't need anything, right? And if there are other types of shopping where I may enjoy the experience, I may want to go to the store. I want to do a lot of research. I want to do it myself. There's going to be a whole range of things. And so, yes, for some tasks, it's going to get rid of the pedestrian. I just want to get the thing done. But in the enterprise collaboration world and in the business workflow world, agents are going to help and are already helping, I would argue, in in in a lot of cases, move the work forward to let people honestly focus on higher value, creative parts of the job. I think that will change a lot of jobs, but I don't think it's necessarily negative, nor do I think it's bad for Alassian. I think it's great for Alassian. So, um, we want to help be a part of that agentic world, but the experiences of how we do that is a long way from from solved and settled in in enterprise software. >> If I were to ask you on the flip side of that, what is the core strategic decision that will determine the success of Atlassian in the next 12 months? What would your answer be? Yes, I'm I'm well on record. Headless is brainless. Um, by definition, uh, look, I think again we're confused. >> You said this before, Mike. You stand you stand by that. >> Absolutely. Because when people talk about headless in that way, if you're giving up on your user interface, if you're giving up on evolving your experience for a customer uh to solve the problems that you set out to solve for them, if you are not a significant part of that experience, yes, I think that's a brainless bet. That does not mean we're not big on MCP. We're not big on CLIs. Uh I think we have one of the top five top three MCP servers in the world. Like we're hugely big on MCP and its ability to allow agents and harnesses to uh contribute data to our platform and to the teamwork graph and to read data from the teamwork graph and it shows off to be honest MCP and harnesses show off the results of our graph right how great quality our our context graph is to solve all manner of problems for our customers and that's great but if our interfaces and our design is not evolving to solve some problems or some significant part of the problem set better for the customer then yes I think you're going to be in trouble. >> I'm really sorry. So so then you fundamentally disagree then that in a world of agents interface and design becomes less important. >> Absolutely. I think it becomes more important. I think design and experience is the one of the keys to success in the AI era. Like we are massively invested in design and experience at the moment in a way that we we we never have been before and we've always been quite a large investor in design experience. We have continued to upgrade our experience in a way that I would say few enterprise software vendors have done over the last 20 years. It's it's it's really easy to make an app I always think with a current you know say better than 90% of apps out there today that's easy but in 5 years time that app will be better than 20%. It you know experience degrades as we have higher and higher standards to upgrade app experiences is really hard. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of R&D. It takes a lot of um difficult craft work to continue to do that. We're in an era where we're all going to need to uplevel our experiences to handle the AI era. But I do think design experience is even more important in the AI. I think it will be the differentiator. If you argue that technology creation is increasingly cheap, technology creation is uh abundant and verdant. The differentiators will to me clearly one of them will be design and experience. um will be what makes you stand out as an application or as a product or a service. >> So you don't think we'll have horizontal agents which stretch across a number of different vertical providers and do functional work for us. You think the design and the experience of those vertical providers will remain incredibly strong. This is not a leading question by the way. It's a >> I don't I I think uh it's a too simplistic view of the world. I think we will certainly have some horizontal agents that handle a breadth of tasks. I think you will also have vertical agents that go very deep in a singular task. I don't think agents will replace all the interfaces. I think all three of these can be true at the same time. So as an example, we have lots of agents uh that run in a lot of platforms from you know obviously claude and codeex and and cursor and places like this and teams and slack that access the Alassian platform and contribute data back to the Alassian platform. That does not mean that's the best interface to do all the jobs on the Atlassian platform. Uh it can be very useful for a lot of different things. Um and vice versa. We're announcing a lot of features with our partner at Figma, for example, and another set of features with our partner data bricks. In both cases, allowing you to get to Figma functionality and data bricks functionality from within the Alassium platform is really powerful. If I'm reading a conference page and I want to just select a piece of text and say, can you check this number for me? And it goes off to data bricks or to Snowflake through the teamwork graphs data context and gets you back the answer or gives you a small chart. That's great. That's not saying Confluence is a BI tool. Like it's not going to be the power of what you need. But sometimes when you want a quick answer retrieve from somewhere else, it is a very different experience than if I want to live in that world doing that thing. Um same with Figma as an example, right? You can interact with the Figma agent inside of the Elassian platform in lots of places. You can interact with the Elassian platform from inside the Figma interface in a lot of places. It's the definition of A to A. I think it's one of the best examples of A to A across multi- uh uh craft teams, but both those interfaces have strengths in their area of doing things, right? I don't think there'll be one Uber agent that sort of just does everything magically. I'm I'm a big a big bear on the magic button thesis of AI that there'll be one button we press and it does it all for us. I don't think that's how it actually is going to work. So if I go back to that question for you, which is the core strategic decision that will determine the success of Atlassian in the next 12 months, what would you say it is? >> Well, one of the top handful would certainly be continuing to invest and have the best enterprise context graph in the world, continuing to stay ahead. I do think what we talked about before, continuing to evolve the design and experience in the agentic era is going to be a really interesting challenge. Like I love spending time with our design team at the moment because for the first time in a long time we're solving foundational design challenges again, right? I would say the mobile era is the last time where we had to think about completely new design paradigms. Um a lot of the features we're announcing here in Amsterdam are really foundational design breakthroughs. How should agents appear in a broad collaboration platform? How should I interact with them? How do I deal with the problems of humans interacting with agents? Agents operating on behalf of humans. Knowing what is AI and what is not AI touched content and is that a good thing or a bad thing. It's like one thing for AI to 100% generate a piece of text. There's nothing for it to help you write something, right? And and like how do we explain all this to somebody and and where does it matter, right? Uh provenence and accountability are incredibly important. speed and understanding. Do I want to see everyone's agent traces? No. But do I need to understand what they are and learn from them? Yes. Lots of foundational design problems that I think will um improve customers results. But that's it's a really it's an interesting time for that. >> What is the foundational design problem with agents that we have not solved yet? That is >> uh I mean text boxes suck firstly. So giving you a little text box and saying here is a oneline piece of text that you can type characters into and it has unlimited power and it's just a blank white line and you're like well that's a terrible user interface to start with right and we're trying we're seeing lots of attempts at changing this problem. It's an incredibly power. Agents and and and chat in general and LLMs are so powerful and most users just stare at them and kind of use them like Google search, right? Like that's the reality of what they do. But how do you explain the power to them? How do you give them the right power at the right times? There's a lot of talk about agentic UI. Um, you know, the sort of word ribbon that changes which functions it gives you at which times and how does it take that as those functions evolve. There's a lot of this that's a challenge firstly. Secondly, agents doing things on behalf of users is an increasingly common pattern, right? Again, I think software teams are really at the forefront of a lot of this, but I think it'll come to legal teams and HR teams and marketing teams, it's all going to be the same that, you know, if I'm using codeex and it does something for me, for example, if I'm just writing code and CEX creates a pull request, did Harry do that or did Codex do that or was that Codex on behalf of Harry? How much of that was Harry and how much of it was Codex? because um if you've been heavily involved it changes the nature of the content and we need to understand where that comes from because people are going to want to see I just want the human comments here I want just the agentic comments and there valid reasons to see both um this is a really interesting design challenge right the provenence of where content has come from is a non-simple question right we see this with um anthropic watermarking features. It it implies that watermark text in AI is bad. That's not true, right? It's the question is did I contribute one or two ideas? Did I say, "Hey, write me an essay about aentic design and it wrote me 3,000 words or did I say here's my essay on aentic design. Help me make it better." And it just helps me refine it. Completely different. Same set of text, same watermark. How do we help you solve this problem? Right? And then you have a lot of business processes. Every company is just a system of processes put together. A big organic system that's constantly trying to improve its processes. How are we thinking about improving the process? The um versus working on what is flowing through the process and how do we evolve how we how we run that. We see a lot of this in the software factory thinking that is very prevalent at the moment. Um and it's not a great analogy I think always because a factory is a very mechanistic defined edge thing and software is fundamentally very creative right but the idea of it is I'm working on the factory as much as I am watching what's going through the factory but I'm not stirring or chopping or doing the things anymore or stamping out steel right that machines that do that but I still need to operate the factory I still need to initiate I still need to uh handle exceptions I still need to steer and co-create and co-guide often the interfaces for when I jump in and when I don't is a real challenge right as there are more things going on in a company how do I have confidence that when things go wrong I will be notified and when they're going right I'm not notified but if I need to get into the detail I can but I don't have to see all the detail because there's just a sea of things going on so there's so much of this that's um it's just really it's really exciting right a field of of change in design and experience right now >> you spoke about kind of the watermarking of different content types that we've seen I think in 5 years time we'll have watermarked content for human created content because it will be 90% AI created content um that sounds very strange to a lot of people today what do you believe today that is quite spooky today that will be incredibly common in 5 years time. If you think of parallels, finding your wife online would have been crazy 20 years ago. Now 60%. Putting your credit card online. I remember when I started buying on eBay, my parents wouldn't let me put my credit card in. Now, of course, >> when we uh when we started selling software, you wouldn't believe it. We would have we had a fax machine and you would download a PDF off our website. It was a PDF. I think we had a word version as well. You could download the word document or the PDF. You would write in your credit card number and you would fax it to us and we would come in in the morning with these rolls of paper on the ground and we would punch it into a physical machine. That is how we originally put payments for >> Scott. Scott, get off your honeymoon, dude. We got another one. >> We We never like have shipped a disc ever. So, we were like in the internet era, but still payments back then were faxed numbers. That's how companies wanted to pay you. And you would bang it into a physical machine, like type the number in. So dude, what's your kooky thought that you think will be actually incredibly precient for 5 years time? >> I think in 5 years time the whole maybe the watermarked AI. I think there's a good chance that the whole watermarked AI the reverse of what you said is probably true. We don't know what is unai touched content and we also don't think that is good or bad. We don't attribute quality or subjectivity to AI affected content. AI improved content AI in of any form just like today when you go to the movies we don't say which I want to see films that aren't color graded like it's not a thing you just go and watch a film you want a great film there's CGI in all sorts of films you don't expect you know they they film in Sydney at nighttime and they make it daytime with CGI and stuff and do I does it matter to me I don't think so really right I I care about the quality of the story I I think I I think whether text is, you know, how many people are like, I don't want to read your content if word helped me with the spellchecking and grammar checking. There's some version of that that's similar. I guess there's some version where it's entirely AI generated slop. And so it's like how will we think about this spectrum? I don't um I suspect we all just get used to dealing with the fact that it may be entirely synthetic content and hence artal crafted things will stand out more. I still think we'll probably have human judgment that makes things stand out. >> You work with some of the biggest companies in the world. I was chatting to Jason Lumpkin the other day and he was like, "Dude, I tell you, I tell you, none of them want to work with the open models that are Chinese. They just don't want it." And I'm a big investor in fireworks. I believe in open models. I think it's a great thing for the ecosystem, but I am fearful that enterprises don't want to work with largely Chinese open models. Do you see that? And how do you think about that statement? >> Jason's increasingly trying to run one of the smallest companies in the world, I think. So, uh, for good or bad, I always find his his takes amusing. Um, I think that is something that will probably evolve. We want to be very customer-led in our decision-making and there is certainly some customer push back in some places to quote unquote Chinese models. There is not customer push back to open models. Uh we use a lot of Neotron in our platform. For example, we have a deep partnership with Nvidia and that is fine, right? We use some Mistra, we use a bunch of other open models in different parts. Our job again is to apply AI on behalf of our customers. It's not to pick a model. It's to use the best model for the best job. Blending all the models for the best price for the customer and to get the outcome they want, right? Applying the AI is our job. But if there is customer push back to something like a Chinese model, quote unquote, um, that is something that we have to be very careful of. And so we don't use any Chinese models in production, we're very clear about that. I think what people don't understand is the distillation and the back and forth where knowing it's a Chinese model is kind of really interesting, but a lot of the US models are increasingly using Chinese models to train themselves, but they don't say that. And so you end up with all these weird loops where I'm like, I don't know if that disappears over time. I suspect it does, but I think we'll have to see and watch. Um, I do talk to customers sometimes and say, do you use Linux? And they say, yes. And I say, is that European? and they say m yes and I said well I mean I think it's like 40% of contributions or something like this is quite high nowadays come from China because there are some amazing software engineers in China doing all sorts of things but because it's open source we think oh well someone's like checking all of that and actually weirdly with AI we can check that even better than we ever have been able to before and they're happy to use Linux so >> so you think this skepticism is over wrought >> I think there's a geopolitical issue >> around who has this sort of strategic control of the That is a different issue from should we use a model that was uh uh trained in China or by Chinese nationals or by like some version of these two are very different questions if you know what I mean in terms of who's running the world America versus China. That's a big question that's out of my my league and my >> I'm sorry this is where dude you you know years ago you remember when you first met me I was like Harry Potter. Um but you know uh they're not they're kind of one and the same because the people building the models are not able to leave and their families are not able to leave without letting the government know where they are going when they are going and so they are actually merging. >> Uh but I'm not commenting on any of the social issues or other issues in that area. What I'm saying is from a technological perspective for someone to say I'm not going to use a piece of technology that is open, right? If I'm saying I'm not going to use this piece of open source code, I'm like but I have the code. Well, if I if you choose not to use it in your choice, that's totally fine. That's your choice. But for an enterprise to say I'm not going to use a cheaper alternative that'll give me better results when I know what's in it, I think is going to be a very hard long-term choice. And I suspect people are going to take those openweight models which they are already doing and fine-tune and train them and call them their own. Most of the people who are training their own model, you know, large company X claims they've built amazing model for purpose Y and it's got some wacky name. we've seen many many times almost every single time that is if it's not Neotron which it's usually not it is a Chinese model that they've trained or added their own fine-tuning specialization on top of and then they call it their own model and I'm like hang on that's that is the same thing right you've added to it and you've tweaked it you haven't trained it from scratch >> that was actually going to be my question which is like you know we've seen Harvey and I think it's RAMP talk about the benefits that they've seen from building their own models You very clearly said last year that that wasn't a strategic focus for you and that you weren't going to go down that route. Now with the benefit of hindsight, has your thinking changed when you see all of these companies come out and talk about the benefits of building their own models? Have you been validated? How how has that thought process changed? >> The jury is really out on the benefits of building specialized models at the moment. Um there are definitely cases where specialized models are doing really well. Most of the people building specialized models I would argue are not in those cases though. Uh there are certainly if you have a lot of proprietary data if you have very specialized applications there are definitely approaches to that right. So if you're doing you know certain robotics for example and world model there's a lot of reasons why people are actually doing it that make sense to me. There's a lot of others that I don't think will stand the test of time. They may have at the time of shipping a price performance benefit for a specific application. True. Will that price performance hold up over time? I'm not sure it will as generalized models get better and better and better for a lot of applications. Firstly, secondly, a lot of people who say they've trained their own model, I think they're being a little bit fast and loose with words as far as I'm concerned, we could say we've trained a bunch of models at Atlassian. I say that's We have a bunch of very specialized openweight models that we fine-tune for particular purposes that give great price performance for our customers. Um, that I don't claim to be our own model. I would say like that's where I think the claim is often vastly overweighted. Most of these people are taking a Chinese model generally applying some domain specific intelligence. You see they train them for like a million bucks and I'm like there's no way you trained this for a million bucks. You took someone's billion dollar model and tailored it if you want to think about it generically for a particular application. That's totally fine but that's not really training your own model I would say. Right? if you're not starting with raw data. Um, if that's their definition, then we do that a bunch in a bunch of different places, but it's not my definition of building a model from scratch. >> What if it played out would prove that thesis and your conviction to be wrong? >> Um, if they could continue to show exponential gains over and above using the latest foundational model on a sort of price per watt basis. So we are seeing many more applications of and it's very hard to answer these questions generically because it depends on the the the the target application actually and the time to answer or or solve a problem or a question the cost and the period of time you're in. If you look at look at an agentic harness, it is a way of applying a set of uh prompts and configurations if you want to think about them that way to a certain type of model and reapplying it many many times if you want to think about it as looping so that you can get much more value out of a given class of model. And yes, if you apply better models, you get better results from a lot of those harnesses. And harness design is really really important nowadays, but it's not model progress. These specialized models have to prove that they can stay ahead of the generified model for a given price performance ratio. I don't think I see many of them doing that. Certainly not the vast majority of them doing that because you would need to have a continued specialized data set and a problem that doesn't get generified away. many people who I think had startups hopefully none of whom you've invested in uh that were building their own models 2 or 3 years ago I think now the foundation models have just basically smashed what they do right like that the quality of the generic model has improved far faster than their ability to stay ahead with whatever specialization they were doing so I think I would need to see the reverse of that >> totally luckily none of my companies have so great relief um the question I have on cost is Mike, it's actually a joke we have with founders that I interview because I interview a lot of like very fast growing company CEOs and they're all private and I go how do you think about the cost tradeoff frontier versus open where maybe you there's a little bit of a detriment in performance and they go you kidding me dude you've seen how much money I've raised and they're always like can you take that bit out but I give a about cost no >> you do I mean you're a public how do you think about that without the luxury of give a I'm private and I've raised a bunch of money. >> Um, Amanda, I love all these private companies that have raised a bunch of money and don't have to care about cost cuz they're not building the discipline to care about cost. Some of them do, but over time, discipline is really important. Anything you do in life, it's about discipline at some level, right? >> But what if your product is 2 to 3% off theirs because they have the ill discipline to always do Frontier? I guess that depends if you continue to fund them and believe they'll be funded forever. It seems unlikely given the history of technology, but maybe I think cost is really important, but it's not just because of that. I think if you look at a lot of examples out there, it's very easy to use a very expensive model to get pretty good results pretty fast. I think using a cheaper model or an older model and getting good at applying that to problem sets is a real advantage for most technologies and prices and costs. I think customers that that we spoke to, so large enterprises around the world, they're incredibly sensitive to this type of stuff nowadays. They really really care about the price performance. They are increasingly doing so. We have a whole raft of products now that will show you your token spend either across the board in terms of your talent um either in in DX in your engineering organization, right? Understanding where you use which model, where you're getting value, which features you're using it for, uh where you should change to optimize your spending because this is a bigger and bigger budget item and they see it's only going to be a bigger budget item and so they have to care about the spending. Now that I don't think is any different for them buying a generic model or a foundational model off any of the big three or four or five as it is buying a product where that costs are going to be baked into whatever that product they're buying is. So I think that cost discipline is going to arrive continually more and more. Um, and I think it's a strength of ours for example in how we are able to use our our PHOP strength to continue to reduce the price of features that are used heavily. I think that is a a core strength and attribute of a great technology company will be its ability to manage technological cost >> and that would be rooted in intelligent model routting on a per task basis to optimize cost >> model routing model blending um applying the right model at the right time using the right harness that again picks and adjusts itself. It's a real verdant area of exploration right now, right? And we we you have this um the more you can get good at it, the more again you can apply AI to smaller functional areas. If you look at the um so-called decision models, uh uh Jeb and the 15 clones that have emerged over the last 3 weeks, which is insane and amazing and scary all at the same time. um they are often used for tasks that previously would have been too expensive to use even like a GPT3 or GPT4 level model for um and that's great right because we're now applying probabilistic thinking to more and more feature sets I think we're all just going to see better uh uh products as a result >> how do you think about the model routting layer is this an internal capability that every company will just build out commoditized is that particular prowess in it we obviously saw open router as the dear Americans call it bought for for a lot of money. Maybe it's brilliantly strategic, maybe it's not. I don't actually know. How do you think about it? If it is a core phob strength as you mentioned, >> I think for companies of our scale, you have to be very good at doing that yourself. There is a constant challenge with scale. I think any large technology company's probably going to do that internally. Um and that may involve using open router plus many other things plus your internal router and everything else right like these things can be continually layered upwards. I think for smaller businesses or businesses where technology is maybe not their expertise those are just very practical solutions right there are many many model routers and gateways with lots of claims about what they'll do. I think generically it's very hard to just route automatically I think is what they're showing. you need to give enough steer or intent and I think harnesses will also be a part of this. So this is you're sort of talking for generic LLM calls. The more you're using harnesses, they're doing their own sort of routing, right? The more you're using SAS, you you know, you come to the Elassian platform and you use Robo or any of our AI features, you will get model routing happening for you automatically. And it's our job to blend those costs and give them back to the customer for the the best quality answer, for the cheapest quality price at the best speed. this triangle trade-off. We're always looking at an any given feature. That's part of our our USP to the customer. >> And you won't you and and you won't use third parties. That's internal routing. >> That is all internal routing. Yes. >> Yeah. We have an an entire AI gateway team. It's not a small team that is doing that. But we have to do it at at firstly at massive scale. And secondly, we want to continue to reduce that cost where it makes sense. So I say to uh product teams all the time, don't overoptimize for cost in the short term. Build amazing magical features. If they're taken up by customers and what we thought was magical, the customer thinks is magical and it scales. Now let's start working about the cost. Right? So think a little bit in advance. Can we possibly get this cost down? but then worry about that later. Right? If five people using a feature, I don't care how much it costs. If 5 million people use a feature, I'm going to care a lot about cost. And in the middle, I usually have a fair bit of time to keep optimizing. >> What costs a lot today that you don't think will cost a lot in 5 years time? >> Model inference. My maybe slightly spicy take is that the amount of energy, startups, capital, time, smarts, brains, people who would otherwise have gone to work for McKenzie or some NASA or something else working on some version of the price per watt performance of inference is crazy. And I suspect a lot of those take years to come through from new chips to better data center design to ways of uh uh distilling and getting things out of foundational model like there's lots of the the overall progress that I can't believe doesn't bring our price performance unit of an LLM we don't have a good term for this down at a precipitous rate just because the volume of capital being applied the volume of brain and talent being applied is so large. >> Is anyone arguing that that's the case though? I think they're just arguing that Chevron's paradox means that we will use so much more inference. You know, I I have instinct running about 50 different searches continuously in real time every every second of the day. We just use more. >> Uh we will, but it will still mean the cost comes down. So where the cost is near free, yes, it will explode. If something's free, you use an unlimited amount of it, right? and you don't care, you throw it away, whatever. Like if it's not got a waste component to it, which is ostensibly a cost, then yes, that will be the case. I think there's always going to be an economic curve to that though. Right now, the production of technology is faster than the consumption of technology, right? It is ahead. We've reached a tipping point. We can build features faster than customers can consume them in a realistic way that changes their business. There's got to be a point where that just it it doesn't stack up anymore, right? There's not going to be an infinite usage of all of this stuff, right? Your phone has amazing superpowers. It's a it's a supercomput in your pocket. Do you burn the CPU 100% all the time? No, you don't. You not even close. Right. So what happens to this inference layer of value and talent cohort where you mentioned the verticalization of chips the different providers what happens to it Mike in the next few years >> look I think it's just incredibly positive I suspect for those who want to use those models to achieve things whether you're uh coding doing architecture uh improving business processes whatever it is that you are doing um creating art I think think we should see that as a very positive thing. We are going to get higher value technology. We are going to get better products and services for every consumer. Um I think it is going to be a creativity driven economy. One of the the phrases that I've I've liked the most recently, and I I give uh DDA, the the founder of Culture AMP, the the credit because it's his his phrase, I believe, or at least he's the first person that told me, we're moving from a world of information asymmetry to imagination asymmetry, which is such a great way of thinking about it, right? It's no longer I know something that someone else doesn't or I have a particular business knowledge. those knowledges are becoming less about the asymmetric value than can I think about how to apply AI and these technologies to problems in unique ways. That's the creativity that we're all kind of having to see in business now, which is if you're a first principal thinker of our business, it's awesome, right? It's the most dynamic and exciting period that we've ever lived through in technology and maybe ever will. Um, I get why it's scary. I also think it's it's imagination. You're applying new things in fundamentally new ways which is >> if we live in this imagination asymmetry and you were to review the last 12 months where do you think you have not shown enough imagination where you needed to more? >> The biggest problem I have is time which is maybe what all of us have as our problem. I don't mean that in some big philosophical like life and death way. >> I'm a venture capitalist my friend. I sit on the sides and throw shackles in when someone calls me. time. >> I work fairly hard in fairly long days on a lot of different things. Right. So, >> do dude, that's because I'm a podcaster. Terrible decision as well. >> You have you have 50 instinct tasks running simultaneously. I haven't even a chance to to install instinct yet. I've heard about it. I know what it is conceptually. Um, so I think trying to carve out enough time to think is what I'm really trying to do at the moment. That deep long thinking. There's something about the time slicing of the world. You know, people talk about the move from, you know, movies to TV shows to YouTube to Tik Toks, right? It's like the >> Yeah. >> You know, books to to magazine articles to to newspapers to like tweets or whatever. Like everything's getting sharded so much more. And in the agentic world, you can kind of get into this like push the edge and do the thing, push the edge and do the thing, push the edg. and sitting back and long thinking and still absorbing these changes and trying to look at them. We're living through a period of history, I think, where there's a lot of change on a day-to-day basis, but trying to see the year-to-year changes is much harder and it requires sort of a a deep thinking, you know, that that I'm trying to create the space to do. I haven't had it's been a hectically busy year. I haven't had a lot of time to do that, but I'm really over the last two or three months have been actively trying to do that. Even if it's only a couple hours a week, it's very easy to be busy. And I think in AI, even easier to be busy, right? All of your agents and things running, your claws and instincts and muses and whatever are going to keep like attacking your attention. How do you create time for space for real thinking is is I think going to be something I need to get better at. Everybody does. >> Might just give you context. My instinct is an automation to buy Laura Piana shoes for my girlfriend. This is not some incredibly intelligent sophisticated workflow just to give you some boundary. Maybe in Silicon Valley they're doing some things smart. Mine's just like buying Brunello Cinelli. >> I think you'd be surpris I think a lot of the agentic uh uh consumer use cases, right? People have talked about how much of it is basically like shopping and travel. >> Do do if you're an aggregator or you're an advertising engine. I I good luck. Um a question for you. You know, we see a lot of data marketplaces, whether it's your Mccor or your surges paying for a huge amount of data from small companies, mediumsiz companies. You talked about the context graph earlier. Data feeds that context graph. >> Yep. >> How do you think about the cost of data, the cost of acquiring data, and what this market looks like as we evolve? Look, I think it's a little bit different. The corporate decisions and knowledge that underlly the teamwork graph are about us trying to help a company that has made decisions, projects, documents, um data often, for example, how many times are PowerPoint slides the place where people put actual facts and figures? A lot. We're like, data is stored in databases. I'm like, nah, there's a lot of data stored in PowerPoints and it didn't actually ever make it to a database. How do we take all of that organizational knowledge, history, decision-m, wrap it into um a social graph of the people in the organization and add code, the technological services created by a company and mix all that together so we can give you great answers and learnings and decisions and there's a lot of inference we can apply on top on behalf of the company as well as being a continual self-learning. Right? The teamwork graph's job is to infer ahead of your agent before your agent has asked a question to inferred the best possible answer to that. Think about it like Google's index of the web. It doesn't go and crawl all of those websites to answer your question. It does that in advance. It has a lot of really smart indexing and inference technology to create an index so that it can answer questions very cheaply and at scale. That's our job, but tailored for every single company that has a wholly different set of information. um that's very unique to each individual company. I don't think they're going to sell that information. I'm not sure it's particularly useful. Uh I know we saw Macar or Google, I forget who actually end up winning buying the S and Southwest. It was >> Spirit Spirit Airlines data, >> you know, 30 million bucks for a million emails and a bunch of other sort of corporate data. Um I don't know if that will become a trend, but I think the value of that data inside a company is very much the same. The important part is that it's alive. So the social graph of a company is valid today and only today. Tomorrow there will be different people in a company than there were today. Some people left, some people joined. And the social graph is going to continue to shift and change in terms of who works with who on which projects on which areas. Our job actually is to be very fresh with that graph. It's not it's to take history and to infer learnings from it, but that has to be fresh and constantly built on top of. I I say this all the time when it comes to our our memory and our dreaming and how we understand the history of an organization. Knowing that I wrote Java code in 2003 and what code I wrote is totally useless to Atlassian in 2026. Knowing the fact that I used to be a programmer, a bad one, 20 plus years ago, is kind of useful because you may explain a concept to me in a way that a technology savvy person would understand. That's about as useful as it is. Right? Today, I'm a full-time manager of people and a full-time storyteller. I am a part-time dabbler in design and experience and products. Right? That that's that's my job and I love my job. But the history of it is very different. If I looked at your history for the last 10 years, I'm sure stuff you did 10 years ago, some of the echoes and memories of that are useful for you as learnings today, but the actual facts and figures of what you did aren't very useful. So, an organizational graph has to be very fresh and current with facts and very historical in its learnings and memories to help the organization as best as possible. Mccor is a little different. Those type of companies are looking for large scale generated generic data sets to sell at scale to many other providers, right? To make those uh broad intelligence platforms valuable. I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Maybe if you think about self-driving cars, a self-driving car needs to understand all of the bits of a road and it's a very specialized data set about roads. You know, corners, signs, traffic, babies in pram, cyclists, all this sort of stuff. has to be able to identify them and understand their dynamics and physics and these types of things. Um, know that a cyclist is not going to jump into the road, right? And and it has to understand all this. It doesn't have to know when Albert Einstein was born. It's totally useless to a self-driving car to know when Albert Einstein was born. >> Mike, if you could acquire one company and their data would have the most transformational impact on your context graph. What company would that be? >> I mean, acquiring companies for data isn't particularly important to us. So there's no hole in your context graph so to speak. It >> it's not so much a hole in the context graph. It's the customer's context. It's not our context. We are helping them put it together. We are helping them learn on the knowledge and the work they've acred in their communications. We're helping them connect meaning, connect the dots across that. We're helping their agents connect those dots. We're putting it into a giant graph. We're building a big lexical and semantic search engine on top of the graph. And then we have a query language that makes sense to agents through MCP and CLI. And we're helping them add their own custom data to that. Right? An investment firm cares about stocks. Uh a manufacturing firm cares about, you know, uh supplies of materials. Uh um healthcare firm may care about hospitals and beds and things like there's specific data. And then they all have meetings and documents and knowledge and code and these things. We're trying to put it all together in a way that they can retrieve it and the learnings from it, right? We're building an index for them. It's not the data that makes uh a difference to us per se. >> Can I ask you a weird question that I don't know the answer to? As we see like open AI protrude more and more into docs and Microsoft Office, you're a student of the internet, Mike, in a brilliant way. How do you think about anthropic and open AI's intrusion into traditional applications that you and Microsoft provide? And what do what does the voice in your head say when you think about that at night? Both of them are deep Atlassian partners and we really value our partnership with them. I think they're probably partners with a whole lot of firms, right? Their business is in some ways selling um computing services if you want to think about it, right? They're also in the business of applications to some level. Where those lines emerge, I think is going to be a highly fought over variable future. I don't think anybody knows the answer to that question. I will say if it comes to things like docs, we've faced this question with Confluence for a long time. Confluence is north of a one and a half billion ARR business, that was our last disclosed number a couple of quarters ago. Um, it would be a public company in and of itself. It is still growing well north of 25% per year and at a very large scale. So, it would be a very good public company just on itself. And ostensively, it's just content that you could put 15 other ways into your computer. You probably have 20 ways on your computer right now to write down a piece of text from ones that come with your operating system to ones that come with your, you know, workspace provider. Um, in and of itself, writing content is not a definitive advantage. It comes back to design, experience, purpose, uh, integration into other workflows. So, there's a lot of other things that I I think go into that. that's helped us build a very successful business there. I I think that will continue to be the case. >> Totally get that. Can I ask a really hard one? And you can tell me Harry, please. I don't I don't want to and that's just rude. I I love your focus on design and I love your craft and I feel it in your voice. Carrie and Lineia always talk about like the craft of design too and I do feel it in theirs. people seem to feel the craft of the linear design maybe more than they do in a Jira. How do you think about that? And is that unfair and say if it's unfair? >> Yeah, I think it's unfair. Um, I think there's always going to be changes in those types of things. I think what's important is never to rest. What has made Atlassian successful for two decades and hopefully will for many decades to come is to continue to invest in upleveling every part of our software experience. The standard of what as I said was good design 10 years ago is totally different to what is good design today and it will be totally different 10 years time. The ability to sustain that year on year for a long time is quite different. Right? It's a totally different way of thinking about continual progress and delivery. Jirro and the teamwork collection have had a an amazing year of growth and uh accelerating and growing faster than they ever had at massive scale. Uh and that is in the number of users and attention and a large part of that is because of the design experience. We're showing off really foundational design changes, uh, speed, performance, and efficacy of what it is we can achieve for customers. Um, and in those areas, I think we we just we just run our own race. I think that's the best thing ultimately. It's about customers experience of the um quality of the software in a whole. And it's it's a long race. So, I would say that to anybody. We've been here for a couple decades and we intend to be here for a couple of decades still. I'm in my mid-40s. I don't consider myself to be middle-aged, but uh I love what I do. So, >> do you just think you're built differently, Mike? Like, honestly, my biggest problem right now, and the show is successful because I'm very candid. I'm I'm worried. I'm seeing a load of 20-year-old founders tap the bid. And what I mean by that is they're like tapping out. I I don't want to do this. I'm selling fast. I mean, I'm 12 years in. I've got more energy than ever. You're a little bit longer in the 24. >> Yeah. >> You just you just love the the journey. >> Yes. I think you have to enjoy what you do. I think it's uncommon everybody to manage their own energy supply. What it is energy? >> Um do I get lonely? >> Yeah. Like no, but like without Scott, I have a co-ounder. Yeah. With this my co-founder kind of Kieran. He's not technically but he kind of is. Do you miss it? >> No. Yes. A bit of both. So, I mean, if you mean, am I lonely in terms of, man, I have an awesome executive team and I work with 10,000 of the smartest people. No. Um, I always say that I get to work with an incredible number of very smart people on a daily basis solving hard problems. And if you designed a job for me, I'd be like, that is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Um, if you mean in terms of Scott, just I see him pretty frequently. It's not like he doesn't live like I'm in Amsterdam at the moment and he travels a bit as well but like I don't know we hang out at least monthly and we drink wine or beer and talk about Atlassian and software and AI within the first 3 minutes of of what's going on. So uh it's not like he is uninterested in what we're doing. It's not like I don't get near daily. Um so he's he's very active for a retired person which is great right um you got years of experience but everyone has their own journey to run right and I think that's okay I think what I was trying to say beforehand is you have to understand where your energy comes from I think it's one of the things I I want to make sure I get across to my kids is figure out what it is that gives you energy and try to do more of that thing and you'll be okay in life just in a generalized world right I think a lot of those people you talked about and I get it in the AI era man the the mental health challenges of being a founder have long been written about and have ne never been written about enough I think because it's a very stressful job to feel like you have other people's livelihood it is and and less so at sort of at sort of my you know time but if you're at that early I've raised money I got to get to the next raising I got to build this business I got to get to profits and revenue and customers and um your reputation and name is wrapped up in that. I I see why this it's incredibly taxing. I think we should start by saying all founders are amazing people that they're taking on some insane challenge. They win, they lose, they fail, they succeed, they're still taking on that same challenge. I think the people that you're talking about that get into it for the wrong reasons, it's very hard to sustain the energy. If you don't enjoy creating products or services in whichever industry you're choosing, I don't think you're going to be able to do it for very long. I think there are very few people that are purely motivated by money or being in the right circles that that's going to sustain you for a 5 10 year period, right? I think you're probably doing this cuz you really enjoy it. >> I love microphone talk to you. You're like, "Ah, this is great." >> Dude, I get to interview like people like you every day and it's the most incredible learning thing. I I don't care that I get paid >> and that's awesome. So, you figured out what your source of energy is. And it's one of the things, it doesn't have to be the only thing, but it's one of the things that give you that source of energy. I think when you I I saw you you were ranting about this on another one of these walks down the street the other day, and I think it's totally true, but I've been here long enough. It sounds like I'm very wise old man, kind of scary. You see this with each of these sort of iterations of the technology industry. There is a latest thing that attracts a lot of capital that attracts a lot of people. And when that latest thing turned out to be like yesterday's thing and it still can be incredibly meaningful, right? We saw this when mobile took off. There was all these people that arrived to build mobile apps and mobile companies. They they didn't sustain. The ones that won and sustained are often directed in the same same area. So no, my worry is more that it should be hard and I completely agree with you on the challenges of founders, but we've made it so normal now for someone to come out, raise 15 million bucks as a preede. It ain't that hard to raise 15 million bucks now, hire some people, and then honestly play the founder game and then tap out the minute you can. And I I think we've made it too easy in some respects. And that's venture capitalist fault. >> It's a capital society, right? So we can't there's like that's the the market price for those types of things. Hope that people at some point realize working with smart people on difficult problems for long periods of time. The people I work with are a large part of the reason that I'm still doing this. Right. The people that we get to create with is the source of energy. And I think that's doesn't sound like it's in those people's, you know, DNA to do that. And that's that's going to be hard to sustain. >> Mike, we're going to do a quick fire because I could talk to you all day. So, what have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? Most >> likely future price of inference. >> It goes way down. >> I think so. Further than I thought. >> What does no one say about having money that you think should be said? >> Wonderful thing and a big burden at the same time. >> Why is it a big burden? Honestly, >> I think it's a huge responsibility. I think it's just something that's temporarily held as a legacy and you have a responsibility to do I think society profitable things with it. Society profitable, not personally profitable and I think you feel that that that burden. It's lots of interesting things come with that. >> How do I bring my kids up to not be if they're brought up rich? >> Man, ask me in 20 years time. I hope I get that right. Uh I I think probably try to be yourself. I read a quote from I think it was a Goldman old Goldman Sachs CEO says you can tell a lot about people when they get promoted as to whether they grow into the job or swell into it. And I feel like man I've been desperately growing every year I've been in this job and I definitively do not feel like I deserve this job and I have to work crazy hard to deserve it next year or to grow into it or whatever term. I think it's the same probably some similar version of this with with with your kids. If you are curious, if you are humble, if you have gratitude, if you display all those properties, you're probably given the best chance to understand where it is that that that comes from. But I I'm I'm sure it's a huge challenge. Tell me if you figure it out. >> Actually, I got given some brilliant advice, which is it's just like the National Geographic channel. Watch the elephants, the baby elephants. Watch the adult elephants and copy them. So if you want your kids to be hardworking and kind, maybe be hardworking. Show show them that you miss bath time because you were working hard on that Amsterdam trip to make money for the family and take them to the coffee shop and be really kind to that barista and ask them how their day was and let them see that. Or if you don't want them to retire at 45, cheat on your wife and be horrible to the barista and you'll probably have too. Wow. Uh, yes. I think so. If you're asking, do they copy the way that you act and treat people? I I think I think that's definitely true. >> That was the advice that I took. What's the best advice that you've been given, Mike? You sit around some pretty interesting tables. I >> I think the phrase that I would say certainly for the last handful of years, I would say, wage peace on yourself. Lots of things are really hard and having a good attitude and knowing that you tried your best at something whether it succeeds or doesn't succeed etc. Try not to be too hard on yourself if you've if you've done all the right things. And um I think for a lot of people especially in the tech industry their bars on themselves are incredibly high and that can be in its own way a new sort of stress. So touch grass we w we piece on yourself. >> Final one. What do you not know that you will be capable of achieving that you do need to personally scale? >> I'd probably say the same thing I said before. It's like how to create moments of slow thinking, moments of slowness in the world that is moving increasingly fast. I think that's going to be a skill that we all need to develop. If we think the the notifications on our phone and the pings from social media and all these sorts of things are distractions. If you're not able to handle that today, geez, I think that you know the the accelerated technological pace, that's going to be really hard. It's a real world out there. Like sometimes in the tech industry, everyone just lives in a screen like this. Ironically, I'm staring at a camera in a screen, right? And all these bits and digits and things. Um, you know, there's a real world out there of stuff that we're creating and slow down to go fast. We've got to learn how to slow down and how to really do that that deep thinking um at a time when everything appears to be more fractionalized and speedy. It's a it's a real challenge. >> Mike, do you know how I define a good person? >> Do not. >> Someone who's willing to help with no immediate or clear benefit to themselves of that help being given. You've always been incredibly kind to me. Like, thank you. Seriously, I really appreciate it. you haven't needed to, but I really appreciate the relationship. >> Hey, no worries, man. Anytime. Let me know when I can help.